Here is the good side to a weakening dollar and the importance to Free Trade Agreements to our Balance of Trade. Last year, U.S. exports grew by 13% over 2005 to $1.4 trillion. Exports to all regions of the world showed significant growth, rising for 29 of America’s top 30 trading partner countries — and reaching double-digit growth rates in such key markets as China, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, India, Brazil, and the European Union. Exports comprised 11.1% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2006 compared to 9.6% in 2002 and 5.2% 50 years ago.

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Full text of the top secret transcript of the conversation between US President George W. Bush and Spain’s Prime Minister José Maria Aznar at Crawford, Texas, on February 22, 2003, as printed in the Madrid daily newspaper El País on September 26, 2007 (translation: José Guardia)(more…)

Environmentalists, therefore, have missed a huge opportunity. Rather than being leaders in solving the global climate crisis, they are content to be doomsayers and scolds. What Nordhaus and Shellenberger advocate is what might be called post-environmentalism, an ambitious new philosophy that isn’t afraid to put people ahead of nature and to dream big about creating economic growth — neither of which environmentalists have been very good at. Their vision cuts across traditional political divides: It’s pro-growth, pro-technology, and pro-environment.

What if environmentalism’s emphasis on limits and “not in my backyard” restrictions was hopelessly at odds with the average American’s belief in a limitless future? With a handful of like-minded partners, they drafted the New Apollo project, the first version of their plan for a federally subsidized greening of the economy. They hired an economist to run the numbers and determined that a $300 billion government investment could call forth another $200 billion in private capital. (To prove their independence from traditional environmental politics, they picked someone who had worked for the Bush administration.) Switch Grass is a new technology example.

The 10 percent increase in muscle mass helps a batter swing five percent faster, increasing the speed of the ball leaving the bat by four percent. This extra speed, applied to a model distribution of trajectories, could result in 50 percent more home runs, Tobin found.

For pitchers, the results are good but less sensational: pitch speed can increase by approximately five percent, or four to five miles per hour, for a pitcher who throws a 90-mile-per-hour fastball, dropping his earned run average by a half-run per game, Reuters reported.

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One Answer to Global Warming: A New Tax – New York Times
Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax. Q.E.D.

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ESO 40/07 – Galaxy ‘Hunting’ Made Easy Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered in a single pass about a dozen otherwise invisible galaxies halfway across the Universe. The discovery, based on a technique that exploits a first-class instrument, represents a major breakthrough in the field of galaxy ‘hunting’.

There are estimated to be hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, but only about a dozen that sit in front of quasars have been detected at such a distance from Earth. The latest finds have doubled this tally.

Light from the newly found galaxies comes from the time the universe was about 6 billion years old, less than half its current age. By studying the light, the researchers have determined they are starburst galaxies that form lots of new stars — the equivalent of 20 suns a year.

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Wind power takes a toll on migratory bats
The danger of wind turbines to birds has long been known and well documented. Most recently several studies and articles have attempted to place the level of bird casualties in perspective: “More birds killed by cats than wind turbines”. But lesser known—and lesser studied—is the effect wind turbines have on bat populations. Collisions between groups of bats and wind turbines have been observed at numerous turbines in America, Australia, and Europe. While these fatalities, sometimes killing hundreds of bats, have been seen for years, their cause remains unknown.

Though a distressing and new issue, wind turbines are not the only threat to bat populations. Years of pesticide use has taken heavy tolls on insectivorous bats, while timber roofs treated with toxic chemicals is another pollutant issue. Cavers disturbing bats amid hibernation can be devastating. Habitat loss continues to be a top threat—as it is with many species. Finally, these nocturnal flying-mammals are still greatly misunderstood; in some places species suffer systematic killing: people set fires inside caves or use shotguns to decimate what they consider a pest species.

When firefighters, responding to a 1:31 a.m. call, forced the door open, they found more than 100 boa constrictors and pythons – some on the loose.

Others were in metal, glass and plastic cages that had started melting when firefighters arrived at the warehouse at 340 N.E. Fourth St., Battalion Chief Russ Accardi said. The boas were about 8 feet long and the pythons 12 to 17 feet, he said. The big ones weighed about 200 pounds. Some of the smaller ones were dead when firefighters arrived. (more…)

A librarian at this 10th century monastery leads a visitor beneath the vaulted ceilings of the archive past the skulls of two former abbots. He pushes aside medieval ledgers of indulgences and absolutions, pulls out one of 13 bound diaries inscribed from 1671 to 1704 and starts to read about the weather. “Jan. 11 was so frightfully cold that all of the communion wine froze,” says an entry from 1684 by Brother Josef Dietrich, governor and “weatherman” of the once-powerful Einsiedeln Monastery. “Since I’ve been an ordained priest, the sacrament has never frozen in the chalice.”

Pfister has found that from 1900 to 1990, there was an average of five months of extreme warmth per decade. In the 1990s, that number jumped to an unprecedented 22 months. The same decade also had no months of extreme cold, in contrast to the half-millennium before.

Even in the last major global warming period from 900 to 1300, severe winters were only “somewhat less frequent and less extreme,” Pfister says. Over the past century, temperatures have gone up an average of 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is often attributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.

Then Yoshizaki used the salmon-grown trout sperm to fertilize both wild trout eggs and the salmon-grown trout eggs. DNA testing confirmed that all of the dozens of resulting baby fish were pure trout, he reported.

Moreover, those new trout grew up able to reproduce. Sockeye Salmon and Bluefin Tuna are the next endangered species that this technique will be tried on.

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Steve Bass’s Tips & Tweaks Outer Space Apps and Sites For the last couple of days, I’ve had some fun exploring Google Sky and satellite videos. In the last of a series, here are some free tools and sites you can use to expand your knowledge of outer space.If you’re interested in tracking satellites and poking around in outer space (and haven’t had your fill with Google Sky), here are some programs and sites you might want to look at: Click on the Steve Bass link. Also check-out the 2 previous links on his page on Google Sky and Balloon pictures. You can also click on the picture and then on the video, from which this picture was taken.

Using sophisticated eye tracking equipment, the team looked at letters within a word and found that people combined parts of a word that were on average two letters apart, said Simon Liversedge, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Southampton. (more…)

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For the first time in 10,000 years, farming is not the dominating industry « Peter S Magnusson So, firstly, modernization of large economies is largely bypassing industrialization and going straight for service industries – in our western economies the service sector was about two-thirds of the economy, and has grown further (to 71.2%). But the so large parts of the world economy are moving straight to service industries that their roles have changed. Worldwide, in 1996 agriculture employed 42%, industry 21%, and services 37%. In 2006, the numbers are 36%, 22%, and 42%. So in the period, services has overtaken farming on a global scale. (more…)

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The Forer effect (also called personal validation fallacy or the Barnum effect after P. T. Barnum) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. The Forer effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some pseudosciences such as astrology and fortune telling, as well as many types of personality tests.
A related and more generic phenomenon effect is that of subjective validation (Marks, 2000, p. 41). Subjective validation occurs when two unrelated or even random events are perceived to be related because a belief, expectancy, or hypothesis demands a relationship. Thus people seek a correspondence between their perception of their personality and the contents of a horoscope.

It will be interesting to see if after peer review that the British Journal Energy and Environment will publish this survey. In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”